Encore: The internet's fight over dinosaur emoji

A few years ago, we brought you the story of how dinosaur emoji had entered the debate about trans rights. We were reminded of this episode recently when a White House memorandum https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/04/the-npr-pbs-grift-has-ripped-us-off-for-too-long/ lambasted NPR for spreading "radical, woke propaganda" and linked to our story as an example. After the memo, President Trump signed an executive order to stop federal funding to NPR and PBS. We stand by our reporting. And so we decided to bring you the episode again. ***** We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. Click here for the donation page https://secure.givelively.org/donate/trustees-of-boston-university/endless-thread-madness-fundraiser. Thank you! ***** This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed. The co-hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Special thanks for Dane Grey for the artwork.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 0:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, Endless friends. Do you like dinosaurs? Do you like Jurassic Park, the movie? A few years ago, we made an episode about how dinosaur emoji had entered the debate about trans rights in ways you'll hear about in a moment. And we were reminded of this episode recently when a congressional hearing about funding for public media mentioned public radio's, quote, "woke" agenda. We were again reminded when recently the White House put out a press release linking to our episode. And again, when the other day, President Trump signed an executive order to remove Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding from NPR and PBS.

• 1:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  You probably won't be shocked to learn that Endless Thread stands by our reporting about dinosaurs and queer communities that love them. You may also know that the vast majority of funding for public media organizations like WBUR doesn't come from the government. It comes from listeners who support what we do. So we're going to play you our episode about dinos again. And if you want to support the work we do, reminder that you should direct your little T-Rex arms to type on your computer, wbur.org/donate. All right, here's the show. Roar.

• 2:02Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 2:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right. So Amory, can you read this, an incredible piece of literature?

• 2:15Amory Sivertson?

  We've got a telephone, a little dude making some kind of expression with his mouth open, but I can't really see what the eyes are doing. Got a sailboat, a little whale.

• 2:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just for the record, I'm not asking you to literally repeat the emoji.

• 2:32Amory Sivertson?

  Oh.

• 2:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm asking you to read this because it is an incredible piece of literature.

• 2:41Amory Sivertson?

  Well, the first line of it looks like Moby Dick.

• 2:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm. What, how would you translate it?

• 2:50Amory Sivertson?

  First line says, "Got a bad phone call. I gotta get on a boat and go see about a whale."

• 2:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this is, what you are looking at right now, Amory, is an excerpt of a translation, an emoji translation of the Herman Melville classic, Moby Dick or the Whale.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm.

• 3:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  And it's called Emoji Dick.

• 3:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  This was admittedly made years ago, and the book was translated by people all over the world. And what's interesting here is that they actually translated some of the same words differently in emoji, like Queequeg, or the whale, or the sea. And you know what this is like? Like, so do you know the hot and sweaty, red-faced emoji with its tongue out, Amory?

• 3:42Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  What does that one mean to you?

• 3:44Amory Sivertson?

  That, to me, is it's, it's a hot day and you're cleaning out the garage and you're like, oh, this sucks. I'm so hot and I hate this so much.

• 3:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm pretty sure that's not how the kids use it.

• 4:00Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, no.

• 4:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think the kids use that emoji as in like, this makes me horny.

• 4:08Amory Sivertson?

  What? It's not the way we did it in my day, kids.

• 4:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I want us to explore this, um, this specific thing that is happening with this specific set of emoji that's really become this heated debate involving who gets to own the meaning of symbols, specifically the symbols that we all use to make meaning on our phones. And the specific emoji that I want to talk about today, Amory, not the eggplant emoji, not the hot and bothered emoji, or cleaning out your garage emoji. But I want to talk about the T-Rex and Brachiosaurus emoji.

• 4:57Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 4:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brachiosaurus Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

• 5:12Amory Sivertson?

  2022, baby.

• 5:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  And we're going to start with this one, the saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent.

• 5:22Amory Sivertson?

  And what the tug of war over the meaning of these dinos, the tiny armed green Tyrannosaurus, and their goose-necked sidekick and prey, the blue Brachiosaurus, or Brontosaurus, or Opatosaurus, what the meaning of these dinos tells us about how we use symbols.

• 5:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  So to understand this dinosaur emoji story, we thought we should start with a little dinosaur knowledge. So, Amory, join, join me on the, get on the chopper to, uh, to Island New Blar.

• 6:06Amory Sivertson?

  Cue the music.

• 6:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  There it is.

• 6:14Amory Sivertson?

  When did you first become interested in dinosaurs?

• 6:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Was it the Cretaceous or the?

• 6:19Amory Sivertson?

  Cretaceous period.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  Well, I'm 38, so going backwards, that would be.

• 6:25Amory Sivertson?

  This is Riley Black.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  I'm a science journalist and author. I've written books like Skeleton Keys and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.

• 6:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Riley loves her some dinos.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Big and Loud, for whatever reason, was my jam.

• 6:37Amory Sivertson?

  Like when she was five and visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, her first encounter.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  At the time, it was very dark and it was dim, very moody. And just seeing these skeletons that were so much bigger than I was, you know, seeing them in that kind of ghostly light and thinking about, what did they look like? What did they sound like? What did they eat? I remember being very struck, standing in the shadow of a Brontosaurus skeleton, thinking like, what did it sound when it breathed? That sound of just like life coming out of this animal, out of these old bones.

• 7:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Now, she digs for fossils professionally. She writes about it, she tweets about it. Online, she exists in multiple worlds and multiple dinosaur communities.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  A lot of it is very professionalized, people talking about their new papers and new studies coming out and their latest field expedition. There's also a broader community of dinosaur and paleontology enthusiasts, people who just like to know more or they were inspired by Jurassic Park and they want to find out the real stories behind these animals. And the number of paleo artists on social media right now is astounding. Like, when people talk about-

• 7:49Amory Sivertson?

  If you look through some of this paleo art, it is astounding.

• 7:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Amory Sivertson?

  Some of these things look real. Like, there's a feathered Sinoceropteryx-

• 7:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 7:59Amory Sivertson?

  -which kind of looks like a lemur duck hybrid. And it almost looks like it was caught on camera. But within this group of dinosaur artists and enthusiasts, or overlapping with this group, there's another subset of people.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of gender queer, or whatever it is, we love dinosaurs.

• 8:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Along with being a dinosaur expert, Riley is herself transgender. And according to Riley, there is a whole community of gender queer dinosaur enthusiasts online. We had no idea, so we checked it out. Sure enough, they're there. We found dozens of paleo artists online that identify as queer.

• 8:40Amory Sivertson?

  Type dinosaur into the LGBT subreddit, hundreds of results with pride dinos, rainbow dinos, dino moms, dino dads, and a lot of puns, like ally-saurus.

• 8:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Trans ceratops.

• 8:55Amory Sivertson?

  In 2018, the Twitter account for Sue, the T-Rex, one of the world's most famous dinosaurs held at the Field Museum in Chicago, that account updated Sue's bio to include the dinosaurs' pronouns, they/them.

• 9:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's the connection between people who identify as gender queer and dinosaurs?

• 9:13Speaker 04

  I am not entirely sure why. This is an aspect of social psychology, I think, that has not been plumbed as yet.

• 9:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Social psychologists, please get plumbing, because we're not sure why either. Dinosaurs have been around for a while, just like the LGBTQ community.

• 9:31Amory Sivertson?

  And if you remember your elementary school science class or Jurassic Park, you'll recall that dinosaurs are all around, because birds are dinosaurs. And Riley says that fact may be part of the draw for transgender people.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  And I think that aspect of falling into more than one category at once, and some of these threads of sort of transformation through time are just naturally appealing to people like me and other people in the trans community. Bet you never look at birds the same way again.

• 10:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  This community might not be gigantic, but it is strong and undeniably present. And along with art and expressions of pride, you will definitely see dino emoji. Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened? Or what was your?

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I would use dinosaur emojis for emphasis, just to share things I was excited about, especially when paired with other emojis. Like I have a book that's coming out in April about the extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred 66 million years ago. Whenever I'd talk about it, I'd use a little dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji, and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of like the dinosaurs going extinct and plants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun like with storytelling.

• 10:51Amory Sivertson?

  But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that weren't so fun.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  I think my initial knee jerk reaction was just like, well, you can't have them. Like dinosaurs are art.

• 11:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  The T. rex and brachiosaurus were showing up in the profiles of a different online community, kind of as a badge, a dog whistle to say to others within that community, I'm one of you.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me.

• 11:25Amory Sivertson?

  Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERFs, as in T E R F, trans exclusionary radical feminists who call themselves, quote, "gender critical." In other words, anti-trans. Broadly speaking, TERFs promote the idea that trans women are really men, that unlike cisgender women, trans women have benefited from being a part of the patriarchy and thus are a threat to cis women. Above all, they say that unlike sex, gender identity is an ideology and is not grounded in science. We'll come back to this.

• 12:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  You may recall the most famous or infamous person associated with TERF ideology is J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author. Among other things, in 2020, she published a 3,700-word essay defending her belief that the term "woman" as a political and biological class was being eroded by people who refer to trans women as women. Anyway, TERFs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  To see our social enemies, for lack of a better term, taking these symbols and trying to use it as their dog whistle, it was something where it's just like, wait, where's this even coming from? This makes zero sense. And also, dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or gender queer community, but no, we've already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested.

• 12:52Amory Sivertson?

  No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, gender queer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds.

• 13:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the Frog, or the Punisher Skull, or the Swastika. When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed irrevocably. But emoji wrecks and brachiosaurus, it's more complicated because Riley and others refused to let go. More on that in 66 million microseconds.

• 13:41Speaker 00

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• 15:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's not clear if TERFs knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the gender queer community. As far as we can tell, dinosaur emoji began showing up in anti-trans Twitter bios around October of last year. And the catalyst may have been the UK's Parliament, which reminds one of Muppets in more ways than one.

• 15:38Speaker 08

  Denied their rights in this country under her watch. Yeah! Once enslaved, then colonized, and now repatriated. When will Black Lives Matter once again? Yeah!

• 15:53Amory Sivertson?

  David Lammy is a Liberal MP. He's also a shadow secretary. His job is to criticize the Conservative government, to stir up controversy, in a way. He's good at it.

• 16:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  And back in September, Lammy was asked in a meeting about transgender rights. So he responded, calling out his colleagues on the right and in his own party for being anti-trans. He called them dinosaurs, as in "behind the times."

• 16:18Amory Sivertson?

  This was not big news, except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up. TERFs were offended by the analogy, and then they embraced it. Like one person who goes by the handle Lily Lily Maynard, she started tweeting videos of her fellow TERFs outside the Labour Party's headquarters.

• 16:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're dressed in cheap inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off key about genitals, which we are not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google "Labour Party head office", the main image representing the building is of these dinosaurs. It would be comical if it weren't in service of one group rejecting another's identity.

• 17:04Speaker 09

  I feel like the first time we really saw the double meaning of the emoji has to be the eggplant.

• 17:10Amory Sivertson?

  There's one guy you have to call if you want to understand emoji.

• 17:14Speaker 09

  They felt like an odd choice to put on the emoji keyboard. So people kind of immediately saw that and went, "That's funny. That now means a penis."

• 17:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Say hello to Jeremy Burge.

• 17:25Speaker 09

  And I'm the founder and chief emoji officer at Emojipedia.

• 17:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  What does that mean?

• 17:30Speaker 09

  That's a good question. What does it mean? Emojipedia describes every emoji, what it looks like, what it looks like on all platforms. And for me, I oversee a small team of people who do exactly that, describe how people use emojis and how they evolve over time.

• 17:44Amory Sivertson?

  We asked Jeremy, "How common is this? Emoji double meanings used like a badge."

• 17:50Speaker 09

  These days, we have plenty of alternative meanings. You do see Twitter bios, people put an emoji up there. It's sort of an identity. You'll see the American flag is quite popular amongst generally conservative Americans. There's a rose emoji, which fans of Bernie Sanders and sort of US-style democratic socialism in general, you'll see them put that in their Twitter bio. And then you get other really niche sort of ones. In Australia, there was a big water scandal and people started putting a water drop in their Twitter bio. And I don't know, you find that maybe a more aggressive group of people start using it. And then you can't use that in your bio anymore because you feel like you'll be grouped in with people you don't want to be.

• 18:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, did you know about all those?

• 18:33Amory Sivertson?

  Ben, did I know about any of those? No.

• 18:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, I have news. Jeremy had like so many more examples and most of them are not surprisingly related to sex.

• 18:45Speaker 09

  The ear of corn, it rhymes with porn. The bowl of noodles gets used for sending nudes.

• 18:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Some of this stuff is just silly and sometimes it's about getting around censorship on platforms or apps like TikTok, but it can also be about things that are more insidious.

• 19:03Speaker 09

  I think one big topic in the last few years has been the OK hand sign.

• 19:08Amory Sivertson?

  The one with a thumb and index finger forming a circle and the other three fingers sticking up, meaning A-OK. Well, in 2017, some 4chan users created a hoax falsely claiming that the emoji had been co-opted by white supremacists. And then it was. White supremacists really did co-opt the OK symbol.

• 19:29Speaker 09

  Then it evolved and became real and then you have to make a decision along the way. If we're Emojipedia, do we say this does or doesn't mean our white supremacy? And there's no good answer to that.

• 19:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  No good answer because as Jeremy sees it, if the official encyclopedia of emoji doesn't recognize sinister double meanings, then it's ignoring reality. Like if the dictionary only defined swastika as a religious icon. But if Emojipedia does, then it could legitimize how hate groups use emoji and permanently ruin them for everybody else. In the end, Jeremy did update the definition of the OK emoji and said it could be used as a symbol of white supremacy, quote, "depending on context."

• 20:18Amory Sivertson?

  Jeremy's job as the founder of Emojipedia has landed him another job as a voting member of the Unicode Consortium, the group of tech companies and organizations that decide which emoji get added and which get changed.

• 20:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can you go back to the beginning, like the big bang of emoji?

• 20:36Speaker 09

  If you cast your mind back to the late 90s, we didn't have smartphones. They were all basic feature phones. Most of them were black and white.

• 20:46Speaker 09

  And this is the same in Japan, but they realized that, hey, we could send a bit more information. And they were mostly used, the original emoji sets, we're talking 1997 through 99 here. The first one we could find is a heart. And then it evolved to be things like clocks for timetables and weather icons.

• 21:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Over time, these emoji have grown as a set of characters, and they've conveyed even more meaning and emotion. The Unicode Consortium, by the way, was founded even before emoji were invented, back in 1991. And in my opinion, the Unicode Consortium has had a massive impact on how we communicate, because its work, really, is to standardize characters in software on computers everywhere, so that around the globe, we can communicate, no matter who we are, where we are, and what language we speak. Emoji are a part of this slow, global standardization of computerized communication, which is relevant when you realize that even

• 21:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  still, eggplant isn't exactly what someone means when they use the eggplant emoji.

• 21:51Amory Sivertson?

  So, back to the dino fight, which may have been particularly poignant, because Unicode has always struggled with emojis that are used to suggest gender identity.

• 22:01Speaker 09

  It's been a big issue, where a lot of the original emojis were men, if they had jobs, and then the ones that didn't do anything meaningful, that sort of had, they were doing gestures, were mostly women.

• 22:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  I.e. policeman, or woman, getting a haircut.

• 22:15Speaker 09

  There were a few, I don't want to say missteps, but in retrospect, there was a lot of early attempts to fix this by adding counterparts, where, for instance, there was a princess but no prince. So there was sort of a binary added, where if there was a woman, you'd get a man, and if there was a man, there was a woman. But we were left with this position where you couldn't just say, "I'm going to the doctor," and send an emoji of a doctor. You had to pick, is it a woman doctor or a man doctor? Which, it was well-intentioned, I think, but it ended up with us having to say, well, what is the gender of everyone with an emoji?

• 22:49Amory Sivertson?

  Unicode added a gender-neutral, gender-nonconforming, non-binary person to its emoji set in 2017. That was the same year that Unicode received its first proposal for a transgender flag emoji.

• 23:02Speaker 09

  There was a petition about the fact that the lobster emoji had been approved, and why was there no trans flag emoji, as in sort of implying that, you know, why should lobsters get their own emoji when transgender people can't get their own emoji?

• 23:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  There were a handful of proposals for the transgender flag, actually. One was finally added in 2020. Bisexuality, asexuality, and lesbian flags have yet to appear. But while Unicode can add or change an emoji, it can't tell people how to use it.

• 23:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Back in October, queer Twitter refused to let dynos go the way of the OK hand sign. Almost immediately, the community bombarded TERFs with takedowns and messages of trans pride.

• 23:53Amory Sivertson?

  One tweet seemed to bring this fight out of its bubble. It came from a pro-trans cis woman named Courtney Milan. She's a romance writer, but she also dabbles in creating emoji. And in a blow to the TERF community, she tweeted a simple message, quote, "These emoji dinosaurs are both trans. I know this because I wrote the proposal to the Unicode Technical Committee asking for them."

• 24:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Unicode Consortium doesn't simply make emoji. People propose emoji. It is a very official process.

• 24:25Speaker 09

  They are technical documents, and they are trying to make the case for an emoji, but there's often little over-emphatic language often used about why it's essential this emoji be added and what the meaning is.

• 24:38Amory Sivertson?

  Courtney Milan proposed the first set of dinosaur emoji back in 2016: a T. rex, a brachiosaurus, and a triceratops. Her proposal is eight pages long, with charts showing how often people search for dinosaur emoji online, or how many books are about dinosaurs. There are about 500 identified as dinosaur erotica.

• 25:00Amory Sivertson?

  It includes potential meanings for the emoji, including, interestingly, someone who has, quote, "failed to adapt to the times."

• 25:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Courtney was arguing that because she created these dinosaurs, she determined their gender, and she determined that they were transgender. Does Courtney's original proposal say the dinos are, in fact, trans?

• 25:22Speaker 09

  No, I don't see anything in the proposal that really makes that case.

• 25:26Amory Sivertson?

  But that doesn't mean the person proposing it can't declare they are. We've tried to ask Courtney about this. She hasn't agreed to talk to us yet. Riley, for her part, wants us to remember that whatever we may think about the gender or sex of dinosaur emoji on Twitter, we should remember that the millions and millions of years of evolution in biological nature on planet Earth tells a story that's a little more nuanced.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  So we don't know what determined the biological sex of non-avian dinosaurs, as in like triceratops and T-Rex, the ones that we love that went extinct 66 million years ago.

• 26:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Because we don't have the genetics. So we don't know whether it was genetically determined, or today, for example, some of their closest living relatives, like alligators and crocodiles, have temperature-dependent sex determination. So the temperature of the nest determines whether more males or females are going to be born. There are some birds that might have hormonal shifts during their life that make them present and behave differently. And the relevance there is that it tells us that what we think of as biological sex isn't binary, and it's much more malleable than we ever really understood.

• 26:38Amory Sivertson?

  In other words, in Earth's larger history, non-binary is way more common than people think.

• 26:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Speaking of which, one of the sickest burns made in the Twitter battle pointed out something else the TERFs should maybe remember when they post their dinosaur emoji.

• 26:54Amory Sivertson?

  This is a Jurassic Park plot point that I have to say I completely forgot about.

• 27:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Amory Sivertson?

  I don't even remember.

• 27:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's so awesome, though. It's just the best.

• 27:05Amory Sivertson?

  It is, it is, but I don't, I don't, I don't remember the discussion of the dinosaurs changing sex.

• 27:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, if you don't remember, Emery, hold on to your butt.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 27:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  The people who make a huge mistake in open Jurassic Park. In an effort to prevent the breeding of the dinosaurs, make all of the dinosaurs female.

• 27:28Speaker 10

  My grandpa said all dinosaurs were girls.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Amphibian DNA.

• 27:33Speaker 10

  What's that?

• 27:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  But in their DNA cocktail, when they're genetically engineering the dinos, they splice in some frog DNA. And some frog species, well, they can spontaneously change sex.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Even though it might be a little bit annoying sometimes to have people relate the transgender experience to animals that just happen to switch sexes for whatever reason. You know, we do joke around that, like, those are trans dinosaurs. That's a major plot point of that movie is that they change sex and wreak havoc. And the sense that, you know, we're this trans menace in this current political moment where all this attention is being put on us and we're treated with so much distrust and sort of suspicion, that it's a way to jokingly lean into that, I think, a little bit. And say, okay, like, if you think I'm basically a monster, I might as well be, you know, a toothy monster and run amok in some degree.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  And the few bits of sort of representation that that we get become very dear to us.

• 28:32Amory Sivertson?

  Unlike so many other failed attempts to save a symbol, the push against anti-trans use of the dinosaur emoji, it seems to have worked.

• 28:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Some TERFs still have dinosaurs in their profile, sure. But there are so many other people pairing the dinos with messages of pride or just using them in the most literal sense. And, you know, you might say something very specific to the TERFs who tried to use dinosaurs in their profile as symbols of trans hate.

• 29:02Speaker 11

  Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

• 29:06Amory Sivertson?

  And that might suggest that in the continuing evolution of the meaning of the dinosaur emoji, let alone broader opinions, people who try to use the symbols of dinosaurs for hate might be right in one way. Their attitudes might be in store for some extinction.

• 29:33Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

• 29:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, Amory's T-Rex impressions, my Brachiosaurus fanfic? Join our email list. We don't use it often, but when we use it, it counts. You will find it at wbur.org/endlessthread.

• 29:52Amory Sivertson?

  This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Sivertson.

• 29:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Ben Brock Johnson. This episode was edited by Maureen McMurray.

• 30:03Amory Sivertson?

  Mix and sound design by Matt Reed.

• 30:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Special thanks to and additional production work from Nora Sacks, Kristin Torres, Quincy Walters, and Rachel Carlson.

• 30:13Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and just a huge, huge pile of Triceratops poop.

• 30:23Amory Sivertson?

  The best scene, if you ask me.

• 30:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's a good one.

• 30:25Amory Sivertson?

  If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet, or just a huge, huge pile of Triceratops poop.

• 30:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  That you want us to stick our arms in.

• 30:34Amory Sivertson?

  That you want to tell us.

• 30:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  In check to see, why is that Triceratops so sick?

• 30:40Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, email [email protected].

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 31:17Speaker 11

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong... They're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there. Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players, you know, love Joe, and that's why, another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and

• 32:02Speaker 11

  my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 32:05Speaker 12

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different depending on the environment that you're in.